Darn 42's Modeling Stuff

[darn42 1,268]

Thanks for the great advice.

Btw, what's an HDRI background and what is it's purpose?

  Edited September 10, 2012 by darn42  

[darn42 1,268]

I modeled a basic living room and did some lighting stuff, but I have no clue what's going on with the rendering. I am using a lot of glossy reflections in the wood and such so the renders should be long, but this took about an hour and I have no clue what's happening with the reflections on the trumpet. Anyone wanna enlighten men on how I should fix the rendering?

  Edited September 12, 2012 by darn42  

[Cockatoo 2,257]

My first reaction: wow, I didn't realise that trumped was so small! Read: you might want to reduce the mapping size and the bump intensity of the wood. That might help with the grainess too.

The render's grainy appearance might have something to do with the lighting conditions. Increase the intensity to see what effect it has. But I'm just guessing really... without knowing what's going on in a scene it's hard to say what needs fixing just through looking at a rendering.

You are on the right track though. I can tell that's going to be a beautiful image once you've tweaked your lighting/ render settings to get the results you need. The subtle reflections and shadows are really nice.

Btw, I'd recommend trying out the VRay render engine for non-SimCity stuff if you get the chance. I find it much easier to your with than MR once you understand the controls, plus the user base is bigger (more tutorials available, more scenes work with it etc. etc...)

[darn42 1,268]

I would if I had money. The only thing I've seen for vray was like 1000 dollars or 100 dollars for student edition. Is there a cheaper way to get it? But I really want vray. There are so many more tutorials for Vray that I've seen than mentalray... though I've recently cancelled my tutorial site subscription because I can't really watch anything now that school has started.

As for the wood grain, I realized it was huge as well. I'm having some trouble with the material in the viewport so I had no clue what the size was. I just slapped on a generic uvw modifier at a random scale that seemed like it would fit. I'm using the autodesk generic wood setting on some darker wood that fit the table perfectly.

My scene right now is a closed room with 2 sets of open windows (sliding windows) and a screen mesh behind them made using a cutout. Would having a screen mess up the renders like that?

[darn42 1,268]

Ok so I fixed the rendering problem. I have some friends who are professionals and they said to render it bigger then shrink it down, as well as anti aliasing. Anyways, I never saved the scene stuff so I had to remake it, and I think this one is better overall anyways.

What do you guys think?

The reference for a lot of it is my living room, so I'm thinking I will just model out the entirety of my living or at least most of it as another thing.

[Cockatoo 2,257]

It might just be my dull laptop screen, but I can't really see much. The lighting isn't too good.

I did a bit of post-processing on it. Obviously because the image was so dark to start with the quality comes out pretty crappy when I try to brighten it, but this is the level of illumination I think you should be aiming for. Even if you can get the render to just half as light as this, the rest can be done in Photoshop.

[harishna 847]

Yes I agree that the lighting is the scene is too dark, it is difficult to appreciate what is going on. I will increase the level of illumination, unless you are trying to simulate a night scene for an specific reason.

[Jasoncw 11,973]

Yeah it's too dark.

Go to Rendering>Exposure Control. You can start with one of the presets and then fiddle with the numbers if necessary.

And like Cockatoo said, there's Photoshop. Most (almost all) of the great renders you see aren't raw renders from max, they're been a lot of post production. In some "making of" threads/blog entries you'll even find some renders that look pretty mediocre at first turn into absolutely stunning images.

If you want to use that for a portfolio or something, something that could look good is if you added a 2-3 page stack of sheet music.

[darn42 1,268]

Thanks for the advice. I was wondering how I could make it brighter and I just couldn't figure it out.

jason: I was actually thinking about adding some sort of sheet music to the side of the trumpet or something like that, I just wanted to get the lighting and materials all good first.

[darn42 1,268]

How 'bout this?

[harishna 847]

I think now is too much, the scene is so bright that you are starting to loose definition on some details.

[Jasoncw 11,973]

It looks like you have a bump map on the floor, but floors aren't actually bumpy. If you'd like to use a bump map you can use a big noise map instead, and then check the checkbox by the bump map that says something about applying the bump to the surface reflections only (or whatever it says), and doing those two things will have the effect of representing the varnish on the floor, although I don't think that's necessary in this shot. Removing the bump map will reduce the render times quite a bit in this situation.

What you can do instead is use that map for glossiness instead. That's the most common way of doing wood floors.

Another thing is that the window frames aren't looking too great. I would reduce their reflectivity and glossiness. There's also a bunch of blotchy circular spots on it which usually happens when your photon map isn't good enough. One way to deal with that is to just increase the number of photons you're shooting.

[darn42 1,268]

Thanks again for the feedback. I noticed the bump map too and I was confused. I was just using a preset wood floor texture... anyways, I will change that. I can also tone down the brightness. The circle things I had no idea the fix for that either I'm learning so much with this scene. Thanks a lot for all the help guys.

[darn42 1,268]

Hey guys, I'm back for the most part. I've created a site for my portfolio and I've started hosting some pictures on it. Most of the stuff I have yet to render out a final image and some images aren't final, but anyways, here it is.

http://erickberg.blogspot.com/

The living room, the advertisement, and the trumpet are all not final renders, I just wanted something to put there as filler for now.

And here is my last project I'm going to start before I get back to BATing

It's a random villa I found online, and because of the nature of it, you guys might be getting a BAT from it

[Jasoncw 11,973]

So far so good!

[Toothless Stitch 2,901]

Really like your new projects. Very modern. Your skills are getting even better!

[darn42 1,268]

So I have gotten distracted the past few days. I got a good amount of money for christmas, with which I am probably going to be the student version of the adobe production suite, so I downloaded the trial. Anyways, I am going to be doing a short animation thing with 3ds max, myself, and the adobe suite.

I made myself an animated hologram material which will have a part in this new project, which will involve real footage, holograms, and buildings, all in one! I will post some more progress on this once it is more developed.

[Vlasky 1,803]

^^ for some reason I find that animation hilarious lal

[darn42 1,268]

There it is. Apparently this was a much shorter diversion than I thought. No promises this will be the last video I make instead of BATing, though.

[madhatter106 3,931]

So I have gotten distracted the past few days. I got a good amount of money for christmas, with which I am probably going to be the student version of the adobe production suite, so I downloaded the trial. Anyways, I am going to be doing a short animation thing with 3ds max, myself, and the adobe suite.

I made myself an animated hologram material which will have a part in this new project, which will involve real footage, holograms, and buildings, all in one! I will post some more progress on this once it is more developed.

It's like my mind and TRON, all melded into one....!

[darn42 1,268]

So I realized that I haven't actually done any sort of artistic images rather than technical models from 3ds max. So I decided I'd do that.

 

I am really into light and caustics, so I made something that is really influenced by those, especially caustics. I started just experimenting, and ended up deciding I would model lotus flowers through a very long and weird thought process.

 

 

This was just a quick weekend project and I hope it turned out well.

 

I learned a lot about caustics that I didn't know before in making this as well, and I learned a way of rendering caustics for larger scenes that is significantly quicker and more reasonable than before.

 

Also, I learned how to create physically accurate tinted glass, which could be helpful. It isn't for mirrored glass, unfortunately, though it might help with that. Anyways, instead of changing reflection color or diffuse color, if you start with a glass preset then scroll down to advanced rendering options, expand that, then there's an option for refraction max distance. Turn that on, change the color swatch to whatever color you want the glass, then set the distance to however pure you want that color to be. The closer the distance is, the more saturated the color will be.

 

Hope you all enjoy. I will resume working on chicago now

[darn42 1,268]

I wanted to get better at modeling more detailed things so I did a bit of practice with sub-d modeling (using smoothing) and made an object designed for the purpose of challenging topology and also one of my waterbottles as a practical use.

 

Here is what I came up with...

 

And the waterbottle...

 

And more detailed breakdowns...

 

The threading was interesting, and took me a while to figure out a solution for coming to an end. Here it is up close...

 

If anyone else is interested in improving modeling skills, search blaizer blog on google, the first result is a spanish website that has some great challenging meshes to recreate and some great tips.

 

You can also just recreate something in your house, like I did with the water bottle, and make sure it is something with interesting shapes. Then, recreate it as well as close as you can using various modeling techniques, but remember to end up with a single mesh per section of the model.

Also, the layout of topology is directly related to how cleanly it will smooth. A single vertex that has any more or less than 4 edges entering it won't deform well so don't put them in areas of deformation. Same goes for any polygons with more or less than 4 edges, but try to avoid those in general. If it is necessary, put it in a nondeformed area.

 

A great resource for information on sub-d modeling, something I recommend bookmarking, is this thread: http://forums.newtek.com/showthread.php?98754-Polygon-Table-Help-Building-One

 

So much information on how to organize topology to keep smoothing smooth in that. If you can, and are interested in this, read through the entire thread. There is a lot to be learned.

[darn42 1,268]

 

My new distraction I'm already done with this one. There's a few points that I haven't fixed but I want to move onto bigger and better things. If there's anything really that detracts from the quality of this render please let me know, though.

 

Check out these sexy capitals though

 

mmm... sexy capital.

[Cockatoo 2,257]

Jesus that must have taken forever... how you model like that I have no idea.

 

The scene looks great, good lighting, all looks really nice. My only suggestions would be that the ivy needs a more varied texture and the trees look a little less grey.

[PBGV103 729]

It looks amazing!  I agree with Cockatoo about the ivy.  I think it should be darker and a little less saturated.  As for the trees, the grey of the trees and overwhelming white of the sky gives it a surreal feeling.  I actually like it a lot.  It reminds me a lot of the scenes from the TV show Battlestar Galactica.  It's a sci-fi show, but to be honest it's more about politics, religion, and human rights.  I'd encourage anyone to check it out.

[Bipin 3,403]

Nicely done! My only suggestions would be the ivy and possible some procedural grime on main structure, especially the inside. Other than that though, very well done!

[darn42 1,268]

I've sent applications to every studio that uses 3ds max in the Chicago area, waiting for replies now. In the meantime, I started a new project; designing and visualizing a building. I've just about gotten the exterior scene all fine and dandy, just a few texture hitches to solve-- including a major one on the siding as seen in the last picture-- but other than that I think it looks pretty nice.

 

 

What do you guys think? 

 

P.S. Sorry about being an absentee BATer as of late, I hope to get back to it soon.

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

Great Work on the renders.

[Bipin 3,403]

It is coming along extremely well. Only two things I'd note to review are the gravel textures towards the back on the right-hand side of the second picture and the concrete/rock wall textures of the third picture. The bump maps don't seem to be doing it for me there. Other than that, superb job!

[simlink 1,098]

Wow, awesome design. This is perhaps one of my favourite styles for houses. Great work!